Eliot Van Buskirk

Spotify Insights is a new resource that provides timely, data-driven articles about how people experience music to journalists, music enthusiasts, students, and other curious parties.

As the world’s favorite on-demand music service, Spotify, along with subsidiary The Echo Nest, encompasses a universe of data about every recorded song on the planet, what happens when one of them becomes a hit, how new forms of music travel the globe, and much more.

Both Spotify and The Echo Nest have publicized their research for years. Spotify Insights gives these data stories a new platform that will let us tell even more stories in the future.

We counted 111,690 Spotify playlists earlier this month with the words “road trip” or “roadtrip” in their titles — oodles of great music that Spotify users have chosen with long-distance driving specifically in mind.

To channel that sea of music into four playlists you can listen to, we first identified the 500 most popular songs in Spotify road trip playlists. As interesting as it is to know that folks enjoy driving to these songs, this playlist is all over the place, musically speaking. To make sense of those 33 hours of tunes, Ajay Kalia, Product Owner of Taste Profiles at Spotify, first normalized them for popularity, to filter out the ones that were probably included in road trip playlists just because they’re popular, not because they’re particularly great road trip songs.

“Starting with the full list, we used artist-similarity ‘clusters’ to create playlists capturing a general style of music, like classic rock, indie folk and pop music,” explains Ajay.

The upshot of all of this human curation, big data music intelligence, and Ajay’s number crunching: four great road trip playlists ready for you to take on your next trip:

Mellow Gold Road Trip reflects the fact that that lots of people like to drive to popular rock from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, plus other music that sounds like that:

Pop Road Trip is where you’ll find popular, familiar music, mostly from the charts, and most of it having been released after the year 2000:

Acoustic Rock Road Trip features singer-songwriter music and rock songs, especially acoustic-influenced songs from harder bands (e.g. Incubus’ “Drive”, Foo Fighters “Everlong” acoustic), which lots of people like to hear on road trips:

Power Trip has the road trip songs from genres that tend to over-index among our power users:

For more road trip fun, be sure to try Road Trip Mixtape, from the legendary Paul Lamere, Director of Developer Platform for The Echo Nest, part of the Spotify family. This amazing web app lets you enter any two cities, and it outputs a list of music by artists from the places you’ll be driving through on your trip.

For the past two months, we’ve hosted Spotify’s very first media artist in residence, interactive artist Kyle McDonald, who has built something truly inspiring. His creation, Serendipity, is an animated world map that shows when two people listen to the same song at the same time.

Yes, it’s a mesmerizing piece of art. It’s also true to life, based on real-time data.

In order to show up on Serendipity, two human beings must have started listening to the same song on Spotify within a tenth of a second of each other — basically, at the same time — in different towns, cities, states, nations, timezones, or even hemispheres.

Although they might not speak the same languages, live in the same climates, or believe the same things, they’re playing the same song at the same time. We’ve always known that music brings people together — and now, we can see that togetherness in real time.

“There are so many ways we’re connected to each other, but sometimes we forget, or we just can’t see it,” said Serendipity creator McDonald. “In person, it’s easy to see the features we share, or when we share stories in online discussions. But we’re also connected in more ephemeral ways, and we can extract these relationships with new tools. Even though listening to music can be a very private experience, I wanted to see how often this experience is shared.”

“I’ve heard estimates that half a million people are in airplanes at any moment, forming a sort of city in the sky,” he continued. “Maybe Serendipity shows a similar sort of never-ending worldwide music festival. I hope that when people watch it they feel something that reminds them of listening to music with friends, and they think about what music can do to connect people.”

Serendipity’s beautiful depiction of musical synchronicity between music lovers all over the planet shows us, maybe, just a little, how shared our experience really is.

Music lovers, we know you often want to wear your favorite artist on your sleeve, and as of today, you can. Artists can now sell everything from band clothing to vinyl on Spotify, directly to their fans, thanks to our new partnership with BandPage.

Buying directly from artists on Spotify is another great way to support the people whose music fills your days. We’ve got amazing goodies from artists all over the world. To find them, simply head over to a participating artist’s page and see what they have to offer, in addition to the music you know and love.

Alongside physical merchandise, such as the beverage-insulating “koozie” and T-shirt offered by Miranda Lambert above, artists can sell their fans unique and potentially-wonderful offers in the form of ”experiences” — everything from private online concerts to real-world meet-and-greets, the chance to collaborate on a song, guitar lessons, and other non-traditional offers sometimes found on the likes of Kickstarter.

Spotify launched merchandise sales last year with TopSpin. Now, we’re taking things even further with BandPage, which helps over half a million artists make more money online. (Neither Spotify nor BandPage receives a cut of these merchandise sales.)

Yesterday, Germany stunned World Cup host Brazil with a 7-1 victory, breaking records and Brazilian hearts. But for fans of the German side, which will now advance to the World Cup final, the result was cause for major celebration.

And celebrate they did.

As we did for two earlier matches, we looked at how many people were listening to music on Spotify in Brazil and Germany before, during, and after yesterday’s game. The number of listeners in both countries dipped during the action once again, as people tuned in to the big game.

In Germany, we see a big spike in listeners just after the game’s conclusion, representing some late-night celebrating, before listening declined again as the country went to bed.

Even in Brazil, some fans cranked up music on Spotify after the game, as you can see from the rising yellow line after the game ends. However, they listened a lot less than they did the previous night, and several hours passed before Brazilian listening returned to normal.

The following chart depicts hourly listening in both countries, from the day before the match to this morning:

See the red spike? That’s Germany celebrating its victory.

Keep in mind that, unlike in our last story about World Cup listening behavior, this one concerns countries in much different timezones, which helps explain why listening drops off in Germany faster than it did in the Netherlands or Sweden following their victories. (In Germany, the game ended at nearly midnight on a Tuesday night.)

It’s also worth noting that the chart shows hourly listening. So while it might appear that the Germans started celebrating before the game was even over, the spike actually shows how much they were listening about ten minutes after the game.

But the takeaway is clear: People in the country whose team won at the World Cup were more likely to listen to Spotify following their victory, while people in the losing country listened less than usual.

To celebrate with the Germans, give our post-game party playlist a listen. Or, to commiserate with the great futebol nation of Brazil after its uncharacteristic loss, try this one.

Update: We’ve also created a couple of new German genre playlists, for those looking to celebrate with some German techno or German metal.

Nearly half of the world’s population watched at least a minute of the last World Cup, according to FIFA (.pdf). At this year’s Brazilian extravaganza, we expect even more people to tune in, given that viewership increased 8 percent last time around.

But you don’t need to know that to understand the global impact of the World Cup — especially in the countries whose teams play that day — whose effect on these nations is so deep that it can be measured by how people listen to music in the hours following the victory or defeat of their team.

Our hypothesis: People in the winning countries would listen to happy party music, while people supporting the losing team might resort to less energetic music in order to cool off. However, our acoustic analysis of the top songs after both legs of the qualifying match between Sweden and Portugal in both of those countries actually didn’t show much of a difference in terms of the energy level of listening in those countries.

But we did find something else, which we didn’t actually set out to find. People in Portugal (the winning side) returned to Spotify after the match was over, presumably to celebrate with a post-game party.

Meanwhile, people in Sweden (the losing side) were less likely to listen to music after the match.

Sure enough, there it is: The blue line (Spotify listening in Sweden) continues to decline after the game, while Portuguese listening spiked hard in the hours following the game.

“On the usage graph, we can see both countries’ usage rates go down as the game starts,” said Spotify and The Echo Nest data alchemist Glenn McDonald. “After it ends a couple hours later, however, Sweden’s usage continues to go down, and Portugal’s leaps back up. The victors turn the music back on and celebrate, the losers go to bed!”

To see if the same thing happened during the Spain vs. Netherlands in the World Cup Group Stage, McDonald ran the same test on Friday’s match, a stunning 5-1 upset for the Dutch.

“Well, it’s not very dramatic, but there’s definitely a bigger rebound after the game for the Netherlands than for Spain,” said McDonald.

See that red line jumping up way more than the blue line? Although not quite as dramatically as in the Sweden vs. Portugal graph above, we once again see that when the match ended, the winning country’s music fans tended to fire up Spotify more than those in the losing country (although the Spanish, unlike the Swedes, did increase their listening slightly after their loss).

Our conclusion, so far: People are more likely to listen to music on Spotify after their team wins than after their team loses.

(Note: These graphs do not represent absolute numbers; in other words, they show the amount of listening in each country, relative to how much listening happens there.)

Developers, start your engines. We’ve launched a new version of the Spotify Web API that lets you put everything from album art to music previews into third-party web apps, with a brand new ability to create real Spotify playlists for your users.

Developers, marketers, ad agencies, music hacking gurus, product managers, design firms, and anyone else who wants to build a Spotify web app to further their goals now have a great new tool at their disposal, with more multimedia and baked-in smarts than ever before.

The new web API gives you the power to create powerful music apps on top of Spotify, except instead of founding the company and growing it for eight years, you get to jump right in and start building stuff on day one using our music and metadata, now with the ability to create playlists.

You also get the deep musical intelligence of The Echo Nest. We’ve been hard at work integrating the two APIs so that you can make awesome stuff like this. Your apps can build real Spotify playlists for your users, leveraging all of that Echo Nest data, and all without leaving the experience you’ve designed.

New features include:

Rich Metadata. The new web API lets you retrieve extensive track, album and artist details from the Spotify catalog, including cover art and 30 second track previews.

User Profiles & Playlists. With a user’s permission, developers can now access user profile information including playlists, display name, image, country, email, external URL, and subscriber status. Web apps powered by this new API can also build new playlists for users to enjoy later, in their Spotify apps.

The Echo Nest: Integrated. We’ve been hard at work with new family members, The Echo Nest, to bring the two APIs together. The result: You can build your projects atop the world’s best music service and the world’s best discovery data.